A Story About How Things Got Started

I’ve had the nickname of dupó since high school. With the last name of Dupont, it seemed to fit and when I first heard someone call me this, I immediately liked it. It meant people were comfortable with me, wanted to connect with me and be a friend. Growing up, I worked in my dad’s Phillips 66 gas station where I met a very large cross section of the public at a very young age. I worked on cars, kind of like the Fonz, from Happy Days, starring Henry Winkler, but not really. I was dupó. I had my own brand identity.

Here began the process working with hundreds, maybe thousands of people. Some of the customers drove into the gas station in a Chevy Bellaire, which my dad’s Prudential insurance agent drove, incidentally. That type of car morphed, in terms of brand into today’s Honda Accord. It was the car for the responsible and conservative adult. The convertible drivers? They were a totally different type of person. The Renault drivers? This was a car that routinely caught on fire, when you tried to gas it up. But the owners loved those little French imports. I quickly learned the emotional attachment people had with their cars. Afterall their car was their second largest purchase after their home. But there seemed to be much more going on than the dollar investment. Reacting with all of these people and servicing their cars was my first exposure to brand, but never realized it at the time.

Next came the University of Minnesota where I received a degree in Journalism / Broadcast / Marketing. It was a great education, because it filled my marketing bag with loads of useful tools, for example how to write a story. In order to be accepted to the J-School, you had to pass two composition courses, expository and creative, and then the school taught us how to write a story. Along with this came learning the importance of accuracy; and furthermore, how to tell a story in front of a camera, live in 3 minutes, and how to listen and check the details.

After time in the US Army, I gained experience in four different industries that shaped the way I looked at just about everything.

The first experience was working for the Tennant Company. They sold industrial floor cleaning products, in every type of industry, from steel foundries to parking ramps. Their sales force received exhaustive training to include working in the factory on the assembly line, product knowledge on every machine, and how to make an effective presentation, complete with video reviews of everyone in the class. They hired former teachers for many of the sales positions because they were really good at explaining things, and with this approach they became very successful at selling sweepers and scrubbers. I, on the other hand was moderately successful at selling because I spent a lot of time trying to determine what motivated people to buy, rather than go for the quick sale.

The next stop was a Miller Publishing that was launching an agricultural market research group. They wanted someone to help sell their newly minted research services. I didn’t know much about farming nor market research, but I did know how to sell.

Agribusiness was becoming more sophisticated. The crop chemical and implement companies wanted to be more strategic in the way they went to market. Knowing more about the target audience would be an important element for how these companies trained their sales people and equipped their dealers.

Equipped with 10’s of thousands of names from the ag publications, our research group offered mail surveys, telephone interviews and, what become a ground breaking service at that time, focus group interviews. Ag marketers were thirsty to figure out things like cultural and cropping practices, a hierarchy of influencers and how they might respond to new advertising and new products, and in general how farmers made buying decisions.

We discovered, for example, that the color of the tractor was as important as the transmission. Some farmers were green, they were tried and true John Deere men. It told is that there were emotional connections to brands were extremely important in their buying decision, even ones that were highly sophisticated, with lots of product attributes like tractors. Another example of an emotional connection was a major agricultural lender whose tag line was, “Farming is everybody’s bread and butter.” It was an emotional message because it supported the farmer’s importance in the food chain that most consumers did not understand.

And finally, there were the advertising agencies and the design business, Kazoo Branding, I started, working with many talented art directors, designers and writers to develop brands for every type and size of business from healthcare to entertainment. During this time, I learned the “creatives” could not only write a killer headline or visualize the message, but they were also excellent marketers. They needed concrete reasoning for what they were about to do. It needed to make sense. They needed some parameters. As one art director once told me, “Give me the freedom to work in a small box.” We came to call it the strategy. Basically, it was helping the whole team figure it out.

And this is what we hope to accomplish. Help people figure things out.